SAN ANTONIO – This city has its critics of the war in Iraq and its angry mothers who try to shame recruiters into going home. More than anything, though, it has a powerful patriotism and a deep respect for the military life.

At a time when the divide is widening between the cities and regions that send their children to war and those that do not, San Antonio remains a ready source of what the military needs most: people.

This metropolis – the home of the Alamo and the site of an Army presence since 1845 – is a top recruiting market for every branch of the military. The Army, in particular, which has struggled to sign up new soldiers during the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, has found the San Antonio area to be a reliable and steady source of recruits.

Nationwide, every one of the Army’s 41 recruiting battalions failed to meet its recruiting goal in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, falling 7,000 soldiers short of the goal needed to refill the ranks, according to Army figures. Not since 1979 has the Army missed its annual quota by so many recruits. And yet San Antonio’s recruiters, covering the city of 1.2 million people as well as the area stretching north to Austin and south to the Mexican border, ranked first among battalions by signing up 2,118 people for active duty, 86 percent of its goal.
nytimes.com

That’s right, send the Mexicans. They do all the work here.

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin’s Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?

These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8’s debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to “conditions”, which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a “debt-for-equity swap”, the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa’s debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.
zmag.org

ROME – Five people, including a convicted Mafia figure, went on trial Thursday for murder in the 1982 death of the Italian financier known as “God’s banker” for his close ties with the Vatican.

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The body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging from scaffolding under London’s Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982, with rocks and cash stuffed into his suit.

Although initially ruled a suicide, his family pressed for further investigation, and Italian prosecutors concluded in 2003 that he had been slain.

Calvi was a key figure in one of modern Italy’s biggest banking scandals, which involved elements of the country’s power brokers — businessmen, politicians, Masonic groups and the Vatican hierarchy.

He was found dead as his Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had provided to several dummy companies in Latin America.

The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans, and the Vatican’s bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors but denied any wrongdoing.
yahoo.com

This was the moment when, briefly, the international fascist network,the P-2 Masonic cell in Italy, Latin American death squads, the Vatican, the mafia, elements of the U.S. governmant were briefly revealed to be parts of the same many-headed dragon. What transpired after this was the collapse of the Italian government, the bankruptcy of the Continental Bank of Illinois (through which the Vatican Bank laundered $500 million worth of counterfeit Mafia bonds, and very likely, the murder of the first Pope John Paul 33 days into his reign.

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled “marketplace of ideas” now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it’s almost as if America has entered “an alternate universe”?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation’s decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: “Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?”

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, “The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd’s question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
commondreams.org

Dems’ Strategy on Iraq: Hit the Gas When You Can See the Cliff Up Ahead
…The fact is, Harman’s efforts will likely be nothing but another veiled attempt by the insulated Democratic “Strategic Class” in Washington to continue perpetuating the worst right-wing lies about progressives on foreign policy. You know the lies: progressives are unpatriotic because they opposed blindly invading Iraq on the basis of what we knew were clearly fabrications; because progressives advocate for a more multilateral, cooperative foreign policy, they are weak; And because progressives want our military to actually focus on the real enemies in the War on Terror (ie. al Qaeda and the 9/11 bombers rather than Iraq and Saddam Hussein), they are not tough.

These lies, mind you, haven’t gained real traction without the help of self-destructive Democrats themselves. People like Harman, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) have all openly reinforced these “Democrats-are-weak-on-national-security” lies in order to get themselves headlines. It is the political equivalent of saying “Thank you sir, may I have another?” instead of simply calling out the right-wing spin on progressives’ defense positions for what it is: a bunch of steaming horse manure.

And remember — America knows it is horse manure. The public opposes the war, wants an exit strategy, believes the conflict is damaging U.S. national security, and thinks the war is hurting the effort to win the War on Terror. It seems the only people who are unwilling to say that the “weak-on-national-security” line is a lie are Democrats themselves — the very people being smeared with the lie in the first place.

Instead, Democrats have refused to support legislation forcing the President to outline an exit strategy from Iraq, and have sent their top leaders out to telling the public that the party simply doesn’t need a coherent position on the War. Just see profile-in-courage Rahm Emanuel’s embarrassingly inane verbal acrobatics on Meet the Press this last week. Then, read here and here his cadre of D.C. Democratic operative friends kissing his ass for the performance and praising him as a saint as American troops are left in a violent quagmire (hmm…wonder if anyone is jonesing for a nice fat DCCC consulting contract?).

True, we shouldn’t be surprised by the “Strategic Class’s” behavior. Harman and the elitist cadre of foreign policy “experts” in D.C. are by and large people who never have to actually experience the bloody, life-and-death real-world consequences of their complicity in the neocon’s pro-war agenda. These people, who have paralyzed the party from taking an official and coherent position on the war, are the personification of the thumb-in-the-wind political prevarication that the public disdains.

But even these morally bankrupt souls have to be able to see the obvious, right? Even if they are willing to sell out America’s national security in order to feel “tough” and “strong,” at the very least shouldn’t they still respond to their own selfish electoral prospects? Can they not understand that ignoring Iraq is not only hideously heartless and woefully weak, but also politically precarious as the 2006 elections approach?

President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq – and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.'”

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: “I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state.”
bbc.co.uk

help us, Jeebus.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

WASHINGTON – President Bush, trying to reverse a slide in public support for the war in Iraq, said Thursday that Islamic radicals are seeking to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world,” and called that a prime reason not to cut and run in Iraq.

“There’s always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder,” he said, seeking to address calls from anti-war activists for a U.S. troop withdrawal.
news.yahoo.com

Not surprising that Bush doesn’t get the irony of his words, since they apply to him and his better than anybody.

COLUMBUS , Ohio – States that sentence the most criminals to death also tend to be the states that had the most lynchings in the past, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that the number of death sentences for all criminals – Black and white – were higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was even stronger when only Black death sentences were analyzed.

The results may be shocking to many people, but they aren’t surprising to sociologists who study the racial aspects of the death penalty, said David Jacobs, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University .

“Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past,” Jacobs said. “This hasn’t been done overtly, and probably no one has consciously made such a decision. But the results show a clear connection.”

Another study finding reinforces this idea. Results showed that the number of death sentences in states with the most lynchings increased as the state’s population of African Americans grew larger, at least to a certain point. The researchers believe that is because, as their numbers increase, Blacks are seen by the white majority as a growing threat.
axisoflogic.com

Scientists have recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the deadliest ever to emerge, to the alarm of many researchers who fear it presents a serious security risk.

Undisclosed quantities of the virus are being held in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia, after a nine-year effort to rebuild the agent that swept the globe in record time and claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people.

The genetic sequence is also being made available to scientists online, a move which some fear adds a further risk of the virus being created in other labs.
guardian.co.uk

A researcher interviewed on NPR talked about the “eerie parallels” between the 1918 influenza and bird flu. I don’t know what the heck is going on, but not so eerie, I’m afraid…

An angry groundswell has risen against the appointment of George W. Bush’s personal attorney to the US Supreme Court.

One key question must be asked: as a Justice, would she soon be asked to rule on a conspiracy conviction against her present boss?

…Indeed, the labyrinthian complications of the Plame case multiply the odds overshadowing any simple case against any single individual from the White House.

But conspiracy would be a different story. It would seem patently obvious that outing Plame had to have been discussed in some form by the very top of the Bush junta.

That Bush himself knew Plame was a CIA agent has long since been established. That Libby, Rove and Cheney knew is also beyond doubt.

So how the knowledge of Plame’s status somehow leapt to the ears of columnist Robert Novak and the likes of Judith Miller may be more important than the outing itself.

If Bush, Cheney, Rove and Libby did discuss such a retaliation, and then found a way to make it happen, we are suddenly out of the playoffs and into the World Series.

In Watergate, the coverup became the crime of importance. In Iran-Contra, it was who knew what when. In the Plame case, it could well be who discussed what with whom when.
commondreams.org

Osama bin laden is expected to remain in hiding until he stages another attack on the United States, an ex-CIA expert who had tracked the terror mastermind for two decades warned in an interview.

“As soon as he hits us in the United States again we’ll see how important he is in the Islamic world,” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the “bin Laden unit” at the CIA, told AFP in an interview.

Despite his low profile, bin Laden remains powerful, Scheuer said, shrugging off reports that the Al-Qaeda chief was isolated and his communication network shattered due to a relentless hunt for him.

“We mistake quiet for defeat or irrelevance. And all quiet is disquiet,” said Scheuer, a fierce critic of the Bush administration and its “War on Terror” policy since he left the CIA in November last year.
breitbart.com

Maybe he took a brief leave of absence to plan the damn thing.With ‘fierce critics’ like this, who needs allies?